A Model for Resilience

THREE STEPS TO CREATING A RESILIENT,

CHANGE-READY ENTERPRISE

Business resilience is the ability It’s not an overnight process,

to anticipate risk, mitigate the
impact and move forward with
confidence as you transform
your business. Ultimately, it’s
about adapting well in the face
of unprecedented change and
unforeseen adversity, ensuring
critical applications and data
are always available.
as true transformation never
is. However, this three-step
model provides clearly defined
steps towards achieving
and attaining the resilience
and agility you need.
 STEP 1 Assess your resilience

STEP 2 Design and implement

STEP 3 Manage and test

This crucial first step lays your

resilience foundation and its
importance cannot be stressed
enough: The more thorough
you are with your assessment,
the more resilient, recoverable
and agile you will be.
 1
IDENTIFY ALL APPLICATIONS
AND WORKLOADS
• Since you can’t recover, transform or
protect what you can’t see or don’t
know about, it’s important to get a
full, accurate picture of your entire IT
ecosystem.
• Ensure your IT snapshot captures apps
and workloads that run across a mix
of physical, cloud, internal and external
production environments, which may
be sprawled across a vast IT landscape.
• Include shadow IT in your search,
the devices and apps employees
may use and download without
your knowledge.
• Be aware that there are multiple
ways to find and identify the apps,
workloads and IT assets that make
up your environment. To save time
and streamline the process, there
are tools that automatically scan
and discover your IT resources—
giving you the visibility you need.
DEFINE DEPENDENCIES
Enterprise apps and workloads don’t
typically run in isolation. In fact, their
value is increased when they work in
unison to integrate business processes
or share common data — delivering more
results than any single app or workload
could. To improve resiliency and prevent
interruptions in data flows and business
processes, whether caused by disaster
or your transformation initiatives:
• Understand that, with so many
dependencies, one small change or
disruption can ripple across the entire
IT ecosystem.
• Map the dependencies between each
app and between each workload. How
do they work together to deliver your
key business operations?
• Identify the IT assets they depend on.
Knowing where they run will help you
identify which systems should be first
priority to recover if disruption occurs.
• Leverage available tools to automatically
document app, workload and system
dependencies to speed and ease the
process for you.
DETERMINE APPS AND WORKLOADS
CRITICAL TO CONTINUITY AND
TRANSFORMATION
Certain apps and workloads are crucial
to business continuity and transformation.
Identifying their importance upfront lets
you know where to devote time, resources
and staff so you can be more prepared to
respond, recover and adapt to change or
disruption as it occurs.
• Prioritize applications according
to their criticality to your business.
• Categorize essential apps and workloads
as tier 1, those most important to your
everyday operations or key to maintaining
operations if disaster occurs.
• Continue to tier other apps and
workloads, identifying which are
less essential to your business or
recovery, so you can target efforts
in the right places.
• Beyond continuity, target the workloads
and apps that are key to making your
business operations more agile, so you
can benefit from market opportunities
and technology change, such as
the advantages offered by digital
transformation.
 STEP 1 Assess your resilience

STEP 2 Design and implement

STEP 3 Manage and test

Now that you’ve assessed

your resilience readiness,
the next step is to match the
requirements of each app and
workload with the infrastructure
that best aligns with their
resiliency and recovery goals.
 2
DESIGN WITH ARCHITECTURAL
CONSIDERATIONS
• Explore the performance, availability,
cost and agility attributes of the different
infrastructures available to you, from
physical to virtual resources, provided
in-house or by external providers.
• Give close attention to the security and
regulatory compliance requirements
of each app and workload in your
platform decision.
• Design a technology platform that
is flexible, responsive and agile to
support the dependencies of each app
and workload, as well as the specific
SLAs for each app.
• Tailor your platform choice to the
specific requirements and mission
criticality of each app and workload.
THINK ABOUT THE CLOUD’S
AGILITY
• Consider cloud services in situations
calling for a high level of agility and
availability and rapid scalability.
• Avoid a “one size fits all” cloud
strategy, as different applications
and workloads call for different
cloud approaches.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) works
well for off-the-shelf applications
needing to scale up and down based
on demand or seasonal changes.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), such
as Amazon Web Services, is good for
variable demand applications that have
unique features for your business, such
as billing or online ordering systems or
website applications.
• Hosted Private cloud is better
for applications requiring greater
privacy, or those that have specific/
non-standard design, compliance or
security requirements.
LEVERAGE EXISTING
INFRASTRUCTURES.
• Colocation or hosted data center
services are suited for applications
not built to run in virtualized or cloud-
style computing environments, such
as legacy applications.
• Recovery solutions also need
different approaches, depending
on how mission critical they are or
their required recovery SLAs. For
example, cloud-based recovery is
fast and efficient when applied to
a single workload, but when the
applications have dependencies
on other workloads, cloud recovery
often represents only part of a
wider recovery program.
• Evaluate the pros and cons of single
source solutions versus multiple
vendors or departments. Implement
the design that will ensure all
objectives and SLAs are met.
 STEP 1 Assess your resilience

STEP 2 Design and implement

STEP 3 Manage and test

As you connect infrastructures, apps,

workloads and people to internal or
third-party IT services, implement
a “manage and test” process
throughout to eliminate surprises
in the go-live stage. In addition,
set up a routine testing schedule
to spot problems and look for
improvement opportunities.
 3
VIEW AND CONTROL
As you connect infrastructures, apps, workloads and people to
internal or third-party IT services:
• Implement a “manage and test” process throughout to
eliminate surprises in the go-live stage.
• Take advantage of management tools that provide a “single
pane of glass” view into—and control over—the multiple IT
environments you access.
• Manage and update protection at multiple levels to ensure
technical security, business continuity and recovery is
integrated into your methodology for policy, process
and controls.
• Document recovery processes and conduct training in
emergency management. Engage internal and external IT
teams, carefully outlining who is responsible for what action,
where and when.
• Be better prepared for disruption and disaster with tools
that automate and manage the recovery process, reducing
the potential for missed steps or human errors, so you can
resume operations more quickly.
• As you optimize apps and workloads on a mix of
infrastructures, consider designating an external source
as a service management integration layer, providing
internal staff with a single face for external services and
reducing the complexity of using multiple providers.
PLAN FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
Keep in mind that the comprehensive picture of your
environment created during the assessment phase is only
as current as your last scan. A single change to any app,
workload or infrastructure can cause a domino effect
across the interdependent ecosystem, disrupting business
operations and your transformation program.
• Think about using a tool that automatically finds changes
in your production environment to keep it aligned with
recovery resources.
• Prioritize routine testing and auditing to create a program
for continuous improvement, identifying issues that could
impact continuity and business resilience.
• Consider your customers, employees and the media by
creating a crisis communication plan that demonstrates
your resilience, including how you respond to, recover
from and resume business operations if an adverse
situation occurs.
Make Resilience Real
Being ready for the everyday and the unexpected isn’t
just about reaching resilience, it’s about retaining it
over the long-term. Use this transformation model as a
guide and find out more about how we can
help make resilience a reality in your organization
at www.sungardas.com.
Sungard Availability Services transforms IT to deliver resilient
and recoverable production environments. We leverage our
experience across a broad range of IT landscapes to align the
right workloads with the right infrastructures. As a result, our
customers can streamline and manage complexity, minimize
risk and adapt to change as they make downtime history.

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